Archive for the 'The Web' Category

My daily web surfing routine offered up quite a surprise today: Jeffrey Zeldman has switched to using WordPress. Yes … you read that right.

Over 11 years of hand-coding are done. Finished. Kaput. Jeffrey is the guy who turned me on to web standards (something I now swear by), thanks to that tome of enlightenment that he so lovingly authored: Designing With Web Standards. I read his advice; hung on his every word. And now I practice what the book preaches.

Dare I now convert Born Geek? For you see, I too still code by hand. It delights me, just as it delighted Mr. Zeldman. Being able to wield the elements of HTML, and then commanding them to do your bidding through CSS, is empowering to say the least. But that empowerment doesn’t come cheap.

What great food for thought.

Can Google be losing it? Not only have they signed a deal with the devil (by buying a stake in AOL), but now their folding under pressure to China. What happened to Do No Evil? Apparently that mantra has been thrown out the window.

Agreeing to censor search results is cowardice; there’s no other way to put it. Excuses like “well, it’s the law in China” or “it’s all about the money we’re making” are weak. You aren’t a Chinese company (hence you don’t need to bow to their laws) and there’s plenty of money to be made in all of the other countries of the world.

I once had a great faith in Google. I was certain that they would be the ones to bring down Microsoft. And they still may. But the course they’re on now appears to be leading towards bad things. Now that Google has fallen, who’s left to look up to?

Since its inception, the Amazon Prime service has been quite intriguing to me. My disdain for actual store shopping has only grown in recent years: I dislike standing in line to check out of a store, said establishment never has what I want, and if they do have it, the price is far more than it should be. So online shopping provides me a means of escaping these hassles.

While browsing Amazon recently, I noticed that I had been selected for a free 3-month trial of their Prime service (though I suspect that this “selection” process applies to nearly everyone who visits the Amazon website). So I eagerly signed up and purchased a few items that I had my eye on. Wow! Two-day shipping has never been better. I can get what I want, when I want, and have it shipped to me in two days for no charge (no shipping charge that is … they aren’t giving away merchandise). And I can do it from the comfort of my own home. How great is that?

This convenience has prompted me to do more business with Amazon, fulfilling the company’s precise goal (”give them free, two-day shipping for $79 a year, and they’ll do more business with us”). Amazon often has the lowest prices around, and they stock nearly everything. Finding that rare CD I’ve been wanting is now a pleasure, rather than a burden. Too many times I have been disappointed with Best Buy, Target, et al. in regards to their music and movie selections. I guess my tastes aren’t “mainstream” enough. Oh well … I guess it’s too bad for them. My new shopping outlet is Amazon.com; and I couldn’t be happier.

I’m slowly but surely moving towards adding some database driven pieces to Born Geek. Specifically, I’ll be moving my wish list to a MySQL database, which will make it much easier for me to add, remove, and edit items on the fly. It’s also giving me chance to pick up some MySQL experience, something I don’t have a lot of. With any luck, I’ll be able to move similar stuff to a database at a later date.

Speaking of databases, the server that hosts the SQL databases for this blog has been having some problems. If this site goes down every once in a while, just bear with us. Hopefully things will be back to normal shortly.

My web host, DreamHost, has apparently gone nuts. They recently quadrupled my disk space, and octupled my bandwidth … all free of charge! I now have over 21 GB of disk space available (growing monthly) and over 1061 GB (yes … gigabytes) of bandwidth. Is that totally insane, or what? And this is all in addition to an unlimited number of MySQL databases, 600 email accounts, unlimited domains hosted, and more! All for as little as $7.95 a month.

My one year anniversary with DreamHost passed last month (December 24) and to celebrate, I’m offering a new discount code for folks who’d like to sign up with any DreamHost hosting plan. When you sign up with DreamHost, simply use the discount code borngeektwo to save money. This discount code will save you $65.00 on any plan you choose, excepting the monthly L1, monthly L2, and monthly L3 plans (on which you will save $35, $45, and $55 respectively). I can only say good things about DreamHost (as I mentioned once before). As such, it’s my pleasure to share this discount with you. Just make sure you use the discount code borngeektwo when you sign up!

I just recently obtained my 100th feedback rating at eBay, entitling me to the turquoise star! The next star color change won’t happen until my 500th positive feedback rating, and that will likely be a long time from now; especially seeing as I registered in 1999 and have now only hit 100.

Surprisingly, I’ve only recently had my first truly negative experience on eBay. I listed an old hard drive in early December and a person with no feedback won the auction. But I have still not received payment! I plan on placing the drive up for auction again tomorrow night, and will leave the user negative feedback. I’m thinking about adding a requirement that users with less than 10 positive feedback ratings must use PayPal as the payment method. This would prevent situations like I’m in now (where the person wanted to pay via a money order).

Tonight I bid on 4 hard to find volumes in the Fantagraphics Prince Valiant book series: volumes 34, 35, 38, and 40. And I lost every single auction. What’s interesting is that, if I had won all of the auctions at the prices I was willing to pay, I would have spent $958.50 … for four books! That’s an average of nearly $240 per book; books which cost a mere $16.95 when they were published. It’s hard for me to justify paying such a hefty sum for a single volume, but I am simply smitten with the Prince Valiant comic. And to have come this far in completing my collection dictates that I go all the way. Perhaps I just need to become bolder in my bidding. There are clearly people out there who want them more than I. And at these prices, they must want them pretty bad.

It’s an extremely rare day that I don’t take a look at Slashdot, and recently it’s been the same with Digg. And I’ve recently noticed an interesting trend between the two sites. For the past several days, a number of the stories that made the front page of Slashdot were previously reported on at Digg (in some cases, several days earlier). I find it interesting that the democratic approach of Digg results in faster story publishing than the moderated format of Slashdot. But this process comes at a price. A larger number of duplicate and “junk” stories appear at Digg than at Slashdot (although the latter isn’t without its share of problems). And Slashdot seems to carry more technical articles than Digg (it is, afterall, a techy news site).

I have seen some discussion recently about whether or not Digg will replace Slashdot. Personally, I don’t see that happening. Too much is broken at Digg. You can’t set many personal options, duplicate and “junk” stories are too plentiful, and new content seems to take longer to rotate through the system. I enjoy both sites (although I read them with a grain of salt), and I think both will be around for a long time. Fortunately, they complement one another nicely, and that couldn’t by any nicer for the geeky crowd.

I gave Movable Type a brief try this weekend, and it doesn’t look like it’s what I need for Born Geek. MT is too “post driven” and doesn’t seem to handle static pages very well. I think the main problem is that Born Geek isn’t a blog, and MT was made especially for the blogging paradigm. As such, I am continuing my quest for a decent CMS.

After doing some brief research, I have found two solutions that might work well: Drupal and Typo3. Both are open source CMS’s (which is appealing), and both have relatively nice looking interfaces. The Drupal website is a little cleaner than Typo3, and I found Drupal first, so I think I’ll give it the initial try. I am somewhat tempted to just use WordPress (the system that powers this blog), although I dislike the fact that it builds pages on the fly (something I’d like to avoid with Born Geek’s static content).

Do you know of an inexpensive, reliable, CMS system that would work well with a static, page-based website (i.e. Born Geek)? If so, your comments would be greatly appreciated!

I recently stated that I was looking at adding site search capability to Born Geek. And I have indeed been looking, but the solutions I have been able to find are (at least on the surface) somewhat lacking. As such, I have been giving a great deal of thought to moving Born Geek to a more automated content management system.

This blog is powered by WordPress (a great piece of software by the way), which is geared more towards dynamic web content. Seeing as the majority of Born Geek’s web content is static, I don’t think WordPress is the best fit. I have spent some time looking at potential solutions, but it’s so hard to decide what would best fit my needs. I definitely want something that produces well structured XHTML markup, using CSS for the presentation (web-standards are a must). Perhaps Movable Type is a decent solution, but it’s not free (although a free-version is available). Does anyone have any suggestions?